As Boring As Your Life (Big Brother (TV Series))

Member Name: Peakly

Product:	Big Brother (TV Series)
Date:	09/07/01 (104 review reads)
Rating:

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I could quite easily throw you this old cliché:

“After billions of years of evolution, scientific advancement, social experimentation and relative freedom to entertain ourselves how ever we see fit, what is everyone doing? Staring at a television.”

I could, I have, but I shouldn’t. It’s a tad pretentious, and hypocritical seeing how I myself am staring a similarly shaped computer-screen. And it’s not as if I hold all the answers. If you asked me for an alternative, I could only tell you what I personally do during the hours you folks are staring at your televisions – read, write, play my guitar and masturbate heavily. Just because I hate television, that doesn’t invalidate the fact you love it, and even though what I do instead is more healthy, stimulating and intelligent, the reasons why I do them are of course the same – escapism, distraction, yadda, yadda.


From here, I have two possible directions. One option is to launch into a rant. In this, I would attempt to explain the numbing effects of television – how it dampens your creativity and motivation. How it breeds generations of boring, predictable people. How it blinds your perception of reality, encourages an ignorance of the world in which you live, dictates your morals and installs false sensations of satisfaction, stimulation and reward. And of course how, ultimately, it attributes only to the unhappiness with which you’ll die. I hate television, it makes me feel sick, and one option would be to tell you why.

But in the end, what good would it do? Since the day you were born, every possible area of influence has enforced the message that television is a natural tonic for your boredom, and the easiest, most full-filling method of entertainment at your limited disposal. It’s your primary source of education, and I’m not qualified to convince you otherwise.

So instead, I sh
ould follow the second option, which is to be relevant to the subject I’m discussing. Gone are the days when I feel able to write an opinion that would please me, myself. Gone are the days when a Useful, or Somewhat Useful rating would not tarnish my reputation, and make a mockery of my profile page (lets do it anyway, huh?). Gone are the illusions that you, even the best of you, really read or care about a word I write. It’s no longer a buzz, it’s an obligation. I’m a slave before my time, in a world so few even know exists.


And so, finally, to Big Brother 2. Although I admit to a tolerance of television in general, bad television is not something I can easily abide. Big Brother 2 disgusts me, to the very core of my being. I say this, not as a joker or a sensationalist, nor as a man of pretence. I say it simply because it is the truth. Though you may argue that the show, in application, is innocent and fun, what it makes of us as viewers by its very concept is enough to put me off. It is further confirmation of everything we should despise in ourselves, and the final nail in the coffin of our hype-driven, media-saturated Western world. To name the show ‘Big Brother’ is perhaps greatest travesty of all. Orwell’s beautiful work, perhaps the most relevant warning in literature, has been packaged, marketed and feed to the hordes in perhaps the most vulgar way imaginable.

And of the shows very concept. Humans, locked in a cage and watched like hawks. Yes, they were willing, indeed they volunteered, but to what consequence? Does it alter the reasons why we watch? Does it change why it interests us in the first place? Children, poking at insects trapped in a match-box. Hoping the spider will mate with the ladybird, or the grasshopper will fight with the worm. A further effort to sedate our boredom. More ways to escape to reality of our own, boring life’s. More ‘entertainme
nt’. More things to think about, more things to talk about, more, more, more.

And what shall make the news tomorrow? Whose picture will we see, pasted in the tabloids? The answer is as predictable as the show to which it relates. One the evicted housemates, cashing in on their moment of fame, before we toss them aside for new prey. Perhaps tonight, one of the remaining contestants will do something radical. Perhaps he or she will obey a nature human impulse, and engage another in a kiss, or a dispute. The same things that occur every day in your own life’s. And from that, we have a news story. And from that, we have a craze. More ways to occupy us, more ways to keep us quiet. More, more and more.

Maybe, in a window separate to this one, you have the Big Brother website. You’re hoping that you’ll catch them doing something, anything. At the very least, you’ll be sure to watch the television show, and gossip harmlessly among your friends. More common-ground and conversation material, more excuses to laugh, more ways to avoid facing the things that catch up with you only before you sleep. More and more.

But did you ever stop to ask why. Did you? Ever stop and ask why you care, why you watch, why you bother, why you aren’t doing things that concern you and the important things you neglect? I don’t know. I don’t know you.

But I know people, and I know what I see. I see another, boring, tiring craze. I see people exclaiming for the zillionth time – “I admit, I’m addicted! God knows why, but I am!”. I see pigs, rounded up and taken to feed. More television shows. More celebrities to concern ourselves with. More gossip, more scandal, more sedation. I see us pretending again. Pretending it matters what one housemate says to the other. Convincing ourselves that it matters, by ignoring the voice that secretly reminds us it does not.

>And I see you, and the frown that tilts your eyes. I see the summing up of this brief interruption in your life's. I see the words ‘paranoid’ on your lips, I see your comments telling me how seriously I’m taking things, and how many chill pills I should consume. Your criticism and retorts have been long foreseen. But you know what? The longer I see you indulging in the hype of Big Brother, the less I care about what you may say about me.

For I would quite happily swap a life-time in the shells you’ve created, for a second, just one second, truly free.


“…But somehow, I just really love this show!…”

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